


Art thou the thing I wanted?

by middlemarch



Category: Poldark (TV 2015)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Friendship/Love, Hurt/Comfort, Male-Female Friendship, Marriage, Psychological Trauma, liberal use of Cornish dialect, not quite AU either, not quite a pairing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-23
Updated: 2017-11-23
Packaged: 2019-02-05 23:55:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12805161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: It didn't feel he had been rescued. Nor come home. And he wanted to, with all his heart.





	Art thou the thing I wanted?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [emmadelosnardos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/emmadelosnardos/gifts).



If Demelza had come to Killewarren, Dwight would have seen her approach, for all the hours he stood at the windows like a sentinel. Sometimes, he laid his cheek against the glass to feel the cold sleekness of the panes but mostly he gazed out across the park, into the trees that smudged the sky and tried to see something else besides what his mind showed him. It was better when the servants went out or when Caroline took the carriage to call upon some neighbor, a break in the stillness, a distraction. It only seemed moments that he waited but Caroline told him it was longer, hours, fires burned down to ash from the sturdy logs that had been lit in the forenoon. She coaxed him and teased and now she had started to lose her temper a bit, the way she had once when she was a coquettish heiress and not his worried wife, and had told him he must do something, anything, rather than stand another day like a lighthouse in her drawing room.

He’d had Andraste saddled before he could think better of it and had set off for the hills that led to the cliffs. The sea was like another sky to watch and Andraste beneath him gave some measure to time passing with the sound of her hooves striking earth, the warmth and strain of her flesh against his thighs. He’d found himself at Nampara without noticing it and had almost laughed at how he’d brought himself there without thinking or the canny mare had. Or perhaps it had been the fresh wind at his back like a thousand clamoring ghosts. Ross was away; he’d known it before he saw it, the fields empty and a quietude about the house, a serenity that Ross would always disrupt. Ross was away but not Demelza.

Prudie muttered him inside as she always did, a great relief that she’d gone back to treating him as she always had, a necessary evil she didn’t care to countenance, a troublesome interruption, and had dismissed his greeting with the wave of her floury hand, “Mistress be in the sittin’ room, babbies asleep in their cots, ye surely don’t need an introduction from me.” He’d smiled and felt how it ached. Nampara held a reality foreign to Killewarren, bunches of drying herbs hanging from the rafter, the gleam of the copper kettle, stone and wood undisguised and beautiful with it. He left the front room almost reluctantly but knew he’d not miss it overmuch in a few moments.

Demelza was busy in the sitting room, moving here and there but without her usual grace; she dragged her right foot, a pronounced limp, and before her expression changed to a sunny welcome, he saw the grimace on her lips that meant she was in pain.

“Dwight, why it’s that glad I am to see you!” she cried out and if he had not known her well, experienced physician that he was, he would not have heard the distress underlying. She had meant only that she was happy to have him pay a friendly call, but he grasped that his services were needed here, even if she wouldn’t ask.

“And I you, Demelza, but I must beg you to sit down and let me examine that leg,” he said. The words came easy and that was Demelza again, a relief where his wife was a challenge.

“’Tis nought to fuss over, it doesn’t ail me,” she demurred, arranging some papers on the desk Ross used for accounting.

“Humor me, then. I miss physick like a fish misses the sea,” he said, to make her laugh, as she did, and to acquiesce to his demand. She hobbled over to the settle and sat down heavily, unable to repress a sigh. He knelt before her and glanced up before reaching for her ankle; she extended it forward while drawing up her skirts slightly.

He took the slipper from her foot and touched her gently, his fingers quickly leaving her delicate instep to assess her ankle; it was swollen and when he rolled down the stocking she had loosened from its garter, he found it bruised, putting him in mind of violets, the white and the purple. He moved her heel and she hissed softly but he attended to the bones and tendons beneath his hand.

“Not broken, but very badly sprained. When did it happen?” he asked.

“This morning, ‘twas needful for the stock to be tended and I wrenched it, caught in the muck,” she said without any further explanation and he considered how naturally she undertook the manual labor of the farm and how aghast Caroline would be to hear of it, let alone to imagine herself in Demelza’s place.

“You didn’t bind it?”

“Hadn’t the time. Fair tidden i’twas but shall we mind such a thing?” she said, gasping at the end as he pressed more firmly to determine the damage to her and the risk.

“You must mind, Demelza. For you may incur a great harm ignoring the pain and this must hurt. Quite a lot,” he said. He looked up into her face and saw her blue eyes darkened, her bottom lip bitten. One hand held tight to the edge of the settle and he saw her whitened knuckles. Was it her childhood that did it or some negligence of Ross’s, that made her so very hesitant to express any degree of her suffering? 

“What shall I do then, my fine Dr. Enys?” she replied, trying for a kind mockery.

“I shall bind it and then you must keep off it, for at least a day or two. Make Prudie serve you as she ought the mistress of Nampara. Ask one of your brothers to help in the fields and with the livestock. Or Ross, if he should return tomorrow,” Dwight said, imagining his friend galloping back across the road, leaping down from his horse and shucking off his frock-coat to take his turn in the stalls. Everything Ross did had that unchanging degree of confidence, whatever torments he’d survived in the colonies and in his recent excursion to France borne lightly. He felt the smooth, unscarred warmth of Demelza’s skin and he was back in prison, cold, so cold and his hands were shaking, the excruciating sound of moaning men in between the homely crackling of the fire. He could not help himself, slumped forward and lay his head against Demelza’s leg, her sturdy wool skirt a comfort Caroline’s slippery silk never was. He wept; he had thought he had learned to manage it but he was wrong and it was all he could do to take a breath amidst the tears.  


“Hush now, me’ansum, cheeld-vean, oh don’t be so fair nashed,” she murmured above him, her hand gently on the back of his head, at the nape of his neck where the hair grew too long. He felt her fingers stroking him in unison with the unbroken flow of consolation, her accent stronger, the terms of endearment unfamiliar except for the tone he could not help recognize.

“I’m sorry, I beg your pardon,” he choked out.

“Never you mind that,” she said, her hand still moving, a caress he had not realized he longed for so deeply. He knew he should lift his face from her lap but a lassitude had taken his form if not his voice.

“I don’t know where I am anymore, who I am,” he said. The truth, for once said without any embroidery.

“I suppose you think you must,” she replied.

“You don’t? Everyone else does, assumes I do, that I am most gratified to be rescued and returned home, to swan about Killewarren like a lord of the manor,” he said. Bitterly, because it hurt him. Bitterly, because they were right and he wrong.

“Oh, what a rummage you’re in, Dwight! When it’s the most simple,” she sighed, ruffling the hair that curled a little about his ears, where the skin was still pocked. Her fingers grazed his ear and cheekbone in the lightest sort of cuff, the kind she must give Jeremy before she kissed his plump cheek.

“Simple?”

“You’re everything you were before and more. Physician to the common-folk and finest man of the district, never you mind tellin’ Ross that! And you’re a poor tender patient yoursel’ in need of care and queet, lest you feel yoursel’ like a bit of scudmore, driftin’ about the shore. We all waited such a while for you to be returned to us, we can wait a while longer. There’s nought to rush you, save yoursel’ though I do be thinkin’ you’ve been stinting yoursel’ on possets,” Demelza said. There had been nothing shy or careful about how she spoke and he had missed that, missed the lack of deference, the confident assumption of intimacy and always, her unbroken respect and affection, despite his tears soaking her knee, his shameful collapse.

“You’re the first to say it.”

“Well, wouldn’t I be? Ross’d never, not his way, is it, if there’s not a gallop or a galavant to be part of it and Caroline’s too fearful and grateful in one, a terrible recipe for what’s needful. She wasn’t brought up to it as I were,” Demelza said, chuckling a little. How it soothed him, that she could find a way to laugh so softly, her sweet voice a balm, her lack of trepidation around him, so different from Caroline. 

“As you were?” he repeated. He wanted her to go one talking in this way, thoughtful and astute, without any concern about whether she was the proper mistress of Nampara. Demelza absolute, pure, essential.

“Born to sorrow and the workin’ through, workin’ with it. To unanswered prayers, me’ansum, and that’s the short of it. Countin’ the smallest gifts great,” she replied and he felt something settle in him, that part that was terrified and blinded and unable to be entirely hopeless. The smallest gifts—the driftwood fire on the hearth and a woman’s hand on his head, Prudie’s casual dismissal, the cosseting of being called, again and again, by names that meant he was cherished and understood. His own name said so he might recognize himself again.

“You said I was the doctor of the district but as you are treating me so finely, I think you are the true physician, Demelza,” he said, lifting his face to look at her. How blue her eyes were, now and always, how much of grace was in her expression! How did Ross look away from her?

“No, Dwight. Not a physician. A friend, a dear friend,” she answered, the smile and blessing all in that blue gaze like the sky, like the blue heart of a flame.

“The dearest,” he said. Without qualification or explanation. She wouldn’t need it.

She didn’t, only nodded and reached out a hand to help him up, a callused, slender hand he had not left himself miss in France or Killewarren and now, did not need to.

**Author's Note:**

> I was reading some other Poldark fic recently and it seemed to me that Dwight and Demelza "sort together" for me in a more comfortable and unexplored way than I usually see in other people's stories. I wanted to juxtapose all the suffering and healing both of the characters need while not tampering with the canon pairings unduly. Andraste is a Gaelic goddess of victory. I found a Cornish dialect dictionary online and helped myself. The title is from Emily Dickinson.
> 
> This is also a Thanksgiving story, posted on American Thanksgiving, to reflect my gratitude for friends and writing and unexpected reserves that are offered, without hesitation or demand. Be well!


End file.
